DETROIT, Mich. — Chinese online sales giant Alibaba is in Detroit Tuesday and Wednesday, working to convince American small businesses that China is a market for them — and that Alibaba can create one million jobs in the United States over the next five years.

The company’s Gateway ’17 conference is something between a rally, a training session and an old-fashioned variety show.

One highlight was a keynote by Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma, a man with rock star status in his home country but someone who isn’t a household name here. The company says it expects 3,000 entrepreneurs and business owners from across the United States to attend.

The event has political overtones, as President Trump has made much of the trade imbalance between the United States and China. During his campaign, Trump called out China as a currency manipulator because of its past efforts to drive down the value of the renminbi to gain a trade advantage. He has since backed off that accusation.

Despite a recent turning away from the idea of globalization on the international stage, U.S. small businesses are still eager to get their products out to the world. Cross-border shopping is a promising area of growth for online retailers and Alibaba aims to provide the knowledge and tools necessary to make it relatively simple.

China's online sales giant Alibaba held a two-day conference in Detroit June 20-21, 2017 in an effort to increase the number of U.S. small businesses selling to China.(Photo: Alibaba)

“For U.S. merchants, a lot of that cross-border traffic is being driven by online shoppers in China. And Alibaba, having both a marketplace and a cross-border offering for non-Chinese merchants, is hoping to be those merchants' gateway to e-commerce in China,” said Lily Varon, a business strategy analyst with Forrester.

Alibaba has been struggling to get a foothold on the U.S. market. In 2014 it opened 11 Main, a boutique online site, but quietly closed it a year later.

While Alibaba is omnipresent in China and across Asia, it's little known here. It acts as an online sales platform, but unlike the Amazon model Americans are familiar with, it doesn’t sell directly to consumers. Instead, it operates marketplaces that connect buyers and sellers. It’s hugely popular with Chinese consumers and has 443 million customers there.

But Alibaba is more than simply a place to buy things. It's also a payment system, a chatting platform and a place to play games. Given its outsized footprint and the time Chinese consumers spend on it, Alibaba has deep insight into the things consumers there want — and a lot of them come from America.

China represents a potentially enormous market for U.S.-produced food, cosmetics, vitamins and other items. Chinese consumers don't trust the safety and wholesomeness of Chinese-grown foods and Chinese-made beauty products and they're especially worried about anything that touches their or their children's skin. In China, American food and products have a very high reputation.

While the idea might sound appealing, the devil will be in the details, according to Christopher Balding, an economics professor at Peking University’s HSBC Business School in Shenzhen, China.

Especially for food items, vitamins and supplements, the regulatory hurdles are high and cost-intensive. While multinational firms can take them on, it won’t be easy for small businesses, he says.

“China simply does not have a professionalized regulatory agency like the FDA with clear standards. The FDA operates overseas offices for companies in major markets that wish to get certified to export to the US. China does not have a remotely comparable degree of professionalization that would allow a predictable process to get products approved,” he said.

China still has enormous protectionist tendencies across the entire range of economic and finance ministries, said Varon.

The numbers Alibaba is quoting, creating one million jobs in the United States in five years, seem impossibly large to Balding because the Chinese government would be unlikely to allow it. China still has enormous protectionist tendencies across the entire range of economic and financial ministries, he said.

“Any large increase in imports to China, even via Alibaba, would be met with a swift crackdown.”